Letter from Kaliti Jail

By Birtukan Mideksa

January 24, 2006

“Kinijit is spirit” – Jailed CUDP-Kinijit Vice President Birtukan Mideksa

A specter is haunting the EPRDF – the specter of Kinijit. Reports are seeping through the
prison walls into my cell that cities and towns all over the country are exploding,
furiously burning with the quest for freedom. In schools and colleges people of tender
ages are articulating and demanding their liberties with extraordinary air of confidence
and dedication. Priests are dumbstruck when young men approach and ask them to tell
and live the truth as God requires. The tormentors couldn’t muster up enough courage to
face and address these heroic men. Instead they decry them as Kinijit and try to exorcize
the specter.

Youth Protest – “Wubishit Solomon, a 17-year-old student, said he had been running from police when he was hit with a bullet that passed through his neck.” – AP on police firing into a crowd celebrating Ethiopian epiphany. At least two were killed, and over 34 wounded. (January 20, 2006)

These protestors are ‘romantic’ youths. They may not be partisans of some clearly
articulated ideology or world view. Rather, their romanticism consists in a dedication to
freedom, adventure, risk, emotion and living life to the hilt. These men and women are
fearless. When they are beaten and jailed, they come back for more.

On the first day of November, EPRDF’s security men dragged the leaders of Kinijit away
from our homes and assigned us a new home, at prison, hoping that the ignited flame of
liberation would have stopped flickering soon. In a political soap opera that could only
compare with the Salem witch hunting, false charges were heaped against us, evidences
fabricated and witnesses trained. The institutions which are traditionally entrusted with
safeguarding the rule of law are now being used to suppress all shades of dissent. Reenergized
by the suffocating inaction of some powerful members of the international
community, the authoritarian regime now gloats over the so-called wisdom of the
repression.

Indeed, living behind bar is painful. I have felt pained, when hearing about the struggle of
my fellow country men; for being forced to experience it all vicariously, for being near
but far away from the terrain of the fight. Yet the pain ends right there. Our incarceration
hasn’t liquidated the spirit of freedom. Instead, it degrades those who are fighting against
it into something hateful and undignified. Toughened by the crack down on dissent and
other forms of oppression, other democrats, genuinely committed to the cause of liberty,
and equality are emerging. I am hearing that when the political space for free speech is
closed and the free press banned, web-page news papers are mushrooming, creating
avenues for free exchange of ideas. Talented young writers, passionate about their own
freedom, are blogging in the cyber space. The perfidious and loveless treatment of the
seekers of freedom and justice is getting the victims more and more resolute. Thinking of
that, even within the confinement of my cell, is a pleasant captivity.

I may sound triumphalist; but the struggle is an emphatic confirmation of the statement
that I made four months ago…Kinijit is a spirit. It is a spirit of freedom – a spirit of love
and unity. This spirit engulfed the lives of many during the election debates. Kinijit then
became an amazing confluence of people with different ideas and experience, and yet
united in their compulsive quest for freedom. From Laptop savvy professionals to daily
laborers, the spirit has left none untouched. There must be times when even our haters
would have asked themselves as to why they are opposed so passionately. Like all
dictators they would, of course, carefully steer themselves from the truth. They are,
nonetheless, affected by the spirit.

In a sense, kinijit is like the polish solidarity movement of the 1980s. Solidarity began its
protest with a demand for economic reform. It then metamorphosed into being the
leader of the struggle of the Polish to liberate themselves from the soviet indirect rule.
Kinijit was just an alternative political party before the election debates. Its
transformation to being the spirit of resistance against tyranny was both dramatic and
intense. As this spirit chews Ethiopians, home and abroad, our nation can no longer be
tamed.

Kinijit leaders are, in the Lockean sense, trustees of the spirit. Our relationship with the
Ethiopian people is merely contractual and representational. Prison may disable us from
fulfilling our duties; but the cause will continue to live on, feeding on enough souls to
survive.

In 1981, the Wojciech Jaruzelski government started a crackdown on Solidarity, formally dissolving it in 1982. Its leaders were arrested. But the movement persisted as
an underground organization. In 1989, the people of Poland forced the government to
legalize Solidarity. In the election contest that followed, it swept parliamentary seats all
over the country ending decades of communist rule.

The parallel with our situation is worth considering. A few days after our arrest, the
election board declared that Kinijit didn’t exist. Aided and abetted by Lidetu Ayalew and
the editorials of The Reporter, the government tried, in vain, to divert the nation’s
attention from the quest for freedom to administrative matters – to the “which group will
take over Addis Ababa?” nonsense. Well intentioned diplomats in Addis Ababa, unaware
of the nature of Kinijit and the resistance of the citizenry, innocently subscribed to the
government’s plot. What the EPRDF, Lidetu, and The Reporter failed to grasp is the
nature of our fight, the fight for liberty. What is man without his freedom?